Painting For The Wind

Lei Ziyi may have been interested in structure and frame since she first started to learn painting. What’s more special is that she has been trying to translate her psychological perceptions of the outside world into the structures that have been overlapped and buckled into her composition explorations, or her physiological growth sequences. For example, in “No Painless Romance”, she divides her body into two areas of desirous dream and disillusioned despair, and the seed-like fist-shaped object in the middle just resembles a throat-grip cutting the flow of normal narration. The faith in her own physical desires, the youth with lost dreams and the anxiety about reality and desire have been all folded back and forth in the twists and turns of the transparent and translucent spaces, and sometimes transformed into a huge eye or limbs. Her painting structures render a burning sense of organs. The structural relationship has been transformed into a symbolic language under the guidance of a frictional and overlapping translucency, and the symbols here introduce the subconscious alleviation of desire. For a while, these structures become the inexplicable landscape depth-of-field relations in her dreams. Now, these structures, generally with a certain oblique movement method, are echoing the symbolic language. The structural space in each painting represents her own emotional perception of some specific experience. Those lines buckled and pulled back and forth mirror her physical and emotional physiological pathways, sometimes lingering and lasting yet oblivious to destinations, and sometimes being suddenly cut off. These lines recurring outside the structural frame have turn into the secret paths grown out of their own structure patterns, making the clear and incandescent frame fragmented and unknowable.

Ganlu is a girl who can draw and write very well. When she was studying in the Fifth Studio of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, she always liked to draw collage-based graffiti on large drawing books: with her unbridled smears and line drawings cheerfully dancing in between all kinds magazine papers, wrapping paper, photos, color cardboards and later digital prints, she conveyed what she was on paper. She called this kind of painting “simple-stroke painting”. Afterwards, she fell in love with story-writing. She created various characters, treated the stories as inspirations and backgrounds for her painting, and even directly juxtaposed words and images together, which hones her capability of understanding and applying these two languages. In order to achieve a certain pleasure of writing, Ganlu was acting like an alchemist dived into a laboratory. She mixed all kinds of seemingly incompatible things together, and added her own spells. Then chemical reactions were rolling out, overwhelming and dancing more ecstatically and cheerfully.

Xiaotong’s project for this residency makes the red and green installation series created for last years’ graduation continued, and it also features the processed chair and other daily objects she adopted before. The difference is that this year a wall outside the installation has been added, a restriction imposed on viewing. She sets up three long strip openings that are almost as wide as a human face and slightly narrower than head, via which one can peep inside. In short, the audience cannot get in. The intense contrast between red and green endows those ordinary items with a magical fairytale spirit, and together with the neurotic materials like plastic packs, mesh bags, balloons, fabrics, reflective stickers, etc. “disorderly” showing up in the space, it gives clues to another world that Xiaotong once imagined—goldfish’s life in a goldfish bowl—another work of her, a stop motion animation created in 2019. In such a grotesque space, anything could happen—maybe this is what Xiaotong wants the audience to see through the openings, a dream-like untouchable “Neverland” of “Peter Pan”.